Ask the Director: How can we make your life even better connected?

[Abs]

Hi Everyone,

Ever wonder if you could ask a question or forward an idea directly to a person who is involved in making top decisions for our company? Well, here's that wonderful opportunity for you!

On Tuesday, we’re conducting our first ever Virtual Interview event on the O2 Community that will be hosted by our Sales & Service director. He will be responding to your questions and taking any feedback/ suggestion on this thread between 16:00 – 17:30. So, get your thinking caps on!

How can we make your life even better connected: what are the products, services and experiences we can either improve or introduce?

NOTE: The thread is now closed and we'd like to thank everyone for posting their questions and feedback.

Thanks

Abs

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I would like new Wireless Box firmware updates to be made available for download much quicker. For instance, the latest Wireless Box IV firmware has been pushed out to routers for some months now, but some customers have not received it yet and would like to upgrade manually. The setup cd download on the website still has the old WBIV firmware.

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Hi Oliver

Thanks for your question. This is unfortunately something that I have no personal knowledge of however I hope that one of our fellow forum users reading this will provide an excellent answer for both of us!

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I can't believe how difficult it is to top up a new pay and go sim card. Or how difficult it is to get support on resolving it. I have had 2 sim cards and when trying to top either on 4444 or online I always get error messages. How on earth can you expect customers to join and stay with you if its so difficult to use the service.

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Hi RMR

Sorry to hear about your experience. We try to make our 4444 service as simple as possible and we have tens of millions of top ups every month. It sounds like you're having very specific problems - please get in touch with our webchat team at http://j.mp/O2Help and they'll help you out.

[Anonymous]

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@adamtemp64 wrote:

1 Improved 3g in rural areas

2 Increased minimum data allowance (1GB) especially on business contracts

3 Increased o2 LLU in rural exchanges

4 Introduce a lifetime emergency payg sim that has no requirements for minimum topup or the need to make a call every 6 months to keep the sim active.

5 Include 0800 0500 numbers as part of your mins allowance

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You've made a few points there. We've invested £10bn in network infrastructure in the last decade and we continue to invest £1.5M every day on our network. On top of this, our recent announcement with Vodafone will allow us to reach 98% indoor population coverage across 2G and 3G by 2015.

Point 2 - We have different tiers of mobile data on our tariffs and find that 97% of people use less than 500MB of data on their phone. If you use more than your existing bundle you can buy more data - contact us through webchat (http://j.mp/O2Help) and they can discuss this further with you.

Point 3 - I'll come back to you on this one

I thought point 4 (the emergency sim) was a very interesting idea and something I'll be asking my team to look into. Our current Pay & Go sims deactivate after six months for some good reasons but this may be something we can provide.

Point 5 – Are you referring to any specific 0800 or 0500 numbers? We zero rate a large number of special numbers. These can be seen here: http://www.o2.co.uk/support/generalhelp/howdoi/freenumbers

[Anonymous]

I think I have a suggestion that could benefit the o2 wallet customers. I myself was unable to pay for my physical card as I didn't have a credit/debit card to add to the account. When you create a wallet you automatically have a virtual card number, with which you have to 'top-up' using a credit/debit card. The o2 wallet team put a 'temporary £3' on my account to pay for the card. Would it help to smooth out the process if people were able to go into an o2 store to buy a voucher which would pay for the card? By which I mean that when someone went to order a physical card there could be an option to enter in the voucher code. If you think this is a good idea and could work, or if you find this is to be a non starter I would like to hear back from you.

I look forward to hearing from you

[adamtemp64]

1 Thanks for the 98% is for 3g as well in all the press releases it mentioned 4g not 3g or 2g (2g is 5 bars here on gprs not even edge here)

2 I understand the reasioning behind the data caps but in this growing data hungry climate and mobile business use it may be good to have a higher data rate on business as a starting point. Not gone over personally as make use of all forms of free wifi

3 I await

4 Thanks it is something we see regulary in the forums people losing numbers and credit.

5 No just the general ones not included as not all have national or 0300 numbers it is a pain that theses are charged on mobile networks yet are free on all landline providers. 

Thanks for taking the time to respond

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
To add to PJAndroids point, the software vendors, Apple, Google and Microsoft babe their products internally for months and months with automated tools, tests under extreme scrutiny, so the limited testing that a carrier can additionally perform is all but a waste of your internal resources.

Ship the updates faster, customer experience, satisfaction and carrier perception will be higher.

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Hi Richard

This isn't always the case - we have seen cases where our testing spots issues that go unresolved in other versions of the software. We really believe passionately in this and aim to never release software until it's ready.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Any chance of introducing a MiFi device capable of HSPA+ for Mobile Broadband? The quality of the stock modems is pretty poor. I current use a Novatel MiFi 2352 (Europe) on O2 but it was difficult to source in the UK.

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Hi Reece

That's a good idea...

[adamtemp64]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymous wrote:
To add to PJAndroids point, the software vendors, Apple, Google and Microsoft babe their products internally for months and months with automated tools, tests under extreme scrutiny, so the limited testing that a carrier can additionally perform is all but a waste of your internal resources.

Ship the updates faster, customer experience, satisfaction and carrier perception will be higher.

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Hi Richard

This isn't always the case - we have seen cases where our testing spots issues that go unresolved in other versions of the software. We really believe passionately in this and aim to never release software until it's ready.

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But you let apples go out at the same time as the rest of the world with no o2 branding. I guess apple had the power to dictate the terms of its closed firmware release.

[Anonymous]

Could you go as far as to provide us with these cases please?

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
I'm a fairly big Microsoft fan. I was a previous user of Windows Mobile which O2 supported pretty well with the XDA devices.

Roll forward to Windows Phone and I feel like a third class citizen on O2. The My O2 app is nothing more than a WAP URL redirect and the view my data usage feature doesn't even work. The range of WP7 handsets available is poor. I ended up buying a SIM free phone and dropping from £45 a month to £11 on Simplicity as a result.

@Anonymous importantly for me though is the lack of Visual Voicemail. The feature is supported by yourselves on iPhone and has been supported on Windows Phone since the Mango release but everytime I tweet @Anonymous to ask about it I am basically shunned into the corner to go away. The Microsoft implementation of Visual Voicemail is the same as Apples, so it's just a case of enabling it for a couple of new Device IDs - I don't see what the problem is.

Lastly, with Windows Phone 7.8 update on the horizon and Windows Phone 8 too, I am concerned about how long O2 will withhold the update as they did with Mango and how lacklustre the availability of new WP8 hardware will be in your network.

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Hi Richard

Sorry to hear you feel like a third class citizen. We want all of our customers to feel valued - I will pass your feedback on to the My O2 app and Visual Voicemail teams to see what can be done.

Looking to the future we are excited about the new versions of Windows Phone and will be bringing them to our customers as soon as we can. As I've said, we aim to release software as soon as its ready but passionately believe in testing too. Watch this space.